There are certain things you don’t want to write about. They are too sad or too sordid or so strange that they give you an uncomfortable feeling right in the pit of your stomach. One of these is pedophilia or child abuse. It seems that so many people are writing about this topic in the media these days that another column would be unnecessary, but the letters I get from some of you in my Archdiocesan family indicate that there are enough folks who would want me to talk about it too.

What shall I say? A few weeks ago I was on a live news program on TV and the second question I got was about child abuse. The question caught me by surprise since I was supposed to be discussing another topic, but it did give me a chance to say what I felt from my heart. Hurting a child or a young person through sexual or physical abuse is always despicable and to be condemned whoever the offender is, but when the perpetrator is someone who is trusted by the child because of his role or his profession, the wrong that is done is multiplied and is all the more horrendous. My heart breaks at the suffering this causes the children and their families and I want to add my own deep apologies for any and every crime of this kind by a priest or a minister of religion here or anywhere.

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… I ask you to join me in prayer for the victims of this crime, for their families, and also for the sick and tragic men who have caused all this pain.

May the terrible scars of the children who have suffered – and who now in their adult life still feel the pain and the loss of trust – be made to heal by the love of their families and by the prayers of our community of faith. I hesitated to write you on this, dear friends, because we seem to run into these stories wherever we turn, but hearing from some of you and thinking of you all, I thought I should share my own sad thoughts with you.

At a time when many leaders of the U.S. Roman Catholic Church have been criticized as arrogant, secretive and uncaring, McCarrick has given the scandal-battered institution what it so badly needs: an attractive public face.

Assuming the role of leading spokesman for the U.S. cardinals during their meetings with Pope John Paul II on the sexual abuse crisis, McCarrick came across to many as candid, compassionate and committed to strong reform. In one interview after another, he spoke of a uniform national policy of “zero tolerance” toward priests who molest minors.

“I think he has emerged as a national leader, and I thought his voice was the most sensible voice,” said Scott Appleby, director of the Cushwa Center for the Study of American Catholicism at the University of Notre Dame. “He does get it, and he understands the depth of the problem and the need to address it transparently. . . . If his style of leadership were emulated, I think the church would be in better shape.”

James was 11 years old when Father Theodore E. McCarrick came into his bedroom in Northern New Jersey, looking for the bathroom. Father McCarrick, then 39 and a rising star in the Roman Catholic church, was a close family friend, whom James and his six siblings called Uncle Teddy. James was changing out of his bathing suit to get ready for dinner.

“He said, turn around,” James, who is now 60, recalled in an interview last week. “And I really don’t want to, because I don’t want to show anybody anything.” But he did, he said, and was shocked when Father McCarrick dropped his pants, too. “See, we are the same,” James said he told him. “It’s O.K., we are the same.”

It was the beginning of a sexually abusive relationship that would last nearly 20 years, James said in the interview, the first time he has spoken publicly about the trauma. He asked that his last name be withheld to protect a sibling.

As the decades passed, Father McCarrick became Cardinal McCarrick, one of the most prominent public faces of the Catholic Church in America. He was suddenly removed from ministry last month over a substantiated allegation that he sexually assaulted a 16-year-old altar boy in 1971.

The news changed James’s life. “I got down on my knees and I thanked God that I am not alone and it is going to be O.K.,” James said, through sobs, recalling the moment. “And I can tell somebody and someone is going to believe me.”

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By then, James said, Father McCarrick had begun abusing him sexually. When he was 13, he said, the priest first touched his penis. At 14, he said, Father McCarrick masturbated him in a beach parking lot. When he was 15, James said, Father McCarrick took him to a restaurant in San Francisco, the Tonga Room, and poured vodka in his drinks. He then brought him back to his hotel room and masturbated him and brought himself to orgasm, James said.

“I was absolutely disgusted, afraid,” James said. “I felt fear. What have I done?”

On visits to the East Coast, James, then 16 or 17, said he would go with other boys with Father McCarrick to a fishing camp in Eldred, N.Y., identical to the one described by adult seminarians who said McCarrick abused them there. On these visits, they would sleep together naked, James said, and Father McCarrick would touch him.

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By then, James said he was drinking heavily and doing drugs, habits that began in his teenage years. He said he tried to dissociate himself from the archbishop in 1985, after meeting a woman he went on to marry.

The last time he visited Archbishop McCarrick, in 1989, he asked for money, he said; McCarrick refused, and never called him again. By then, James was 31.

It’s not nearly over. We now know of two minors McCarrick raped. There will be others.

Recall that people like Father Boniface Ramsey warned those in authority in the Church — the papal nuncio, and other American cardinals — about McCarrick’s molestation of seminarians when he was Archbishop of Newark, but nobody did a thing. It wouldn’t have helped those two boys we know he molested, but it would have kept this boy-raper from ascending to the Archdiocese of Washington, and getting a red hat.

Read those words from his 2002 column, a version of which he repeated over and over when the scandal was burning hot, to try to reassure the faithful and everybody else. All the while, he knew who he was, and what he had done. This man is a sociopath.

How many cardinals and bishops knew what he was, and turned a blind eye? Who is in his episcopal network? Who protected him in Rome? Why are there still people in the Church protecting him now?

Forget it. Nothing will change, at least not in our lifetimes, and no one in the hierarchy can ever be trusted again. For those who take these crimes seriously, this is the end of the church as an entity whose good intentions are to be believed.

It boggles my mind that the leaders of the Church can’t see what they are doing to it, and to themselves. But this is not new. Here’s historian Barbara Tuchman, in “The March of Folly”: pic.twitter.com/04Q8JII6LO

Once I believed—or at least told myself—that the deposit of faith could somehow be kept separate from the fallibility of its protectors. Now I have come to feel that the institution itself is radically, fundamentally corrupt, so much so that it is incapable of self-cleansing.

If you don’t know whom you can trust, then it follows that you can’t trust anybody—that everyone is guilty until proved innocent. The mere appearance of sanctity is meaningless: I’ve been a drama critic too long to think otherwise.

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117 Responses to Uncle Teddy, Boy Raper

Julie Lockhart writes “I must point out that a man who chooses to sexually assault boys often is not a homosexual. That is a common fallacy. Many men who abuse boys are not attracted to adult men.” Not a valid point in this case. Many men who abuse little boys are not attracted to adult males, but the majority of the boys in these cases were between 11 and 14 or so at the start of the abuse. They were often considerably older when it ended. The gay priests who were at fault in these cases were not, strictly speaking, pedophiles. They were pederasts, i.e. attracted to adolescent males. I suspect the majority of gay men find adolescent males attractive, as the majority of straight men find adolescent females attractive.

There is a subset of homosexuals who are (or were) called
“chickenhawks,” “chicken” being the code name for underaged boys. The boys must be sexually mature, so this is not, strictly speaking, pedophilia. In some countries, after all, the age of consent is lower than it is here, and sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds would not be considered children.

I am very suspicious of separating the abuse of teenagers from homosexuality. The vast majority of pederasts are homosexuals.

I’m afraid that, these days, just about every ecclesiastical body has a sizable homosexual contingent. Monasteries, Catholic, Orthodox, and Episcopal, are very often hotbeds of homosexuality, as indeed they have been throughout church history. I have known married priests–Episcopalian, in this case, who weren’t discrete about their gay proclivities.

I have become quite cynical about the holiness and even the faith of the hierarchy in general. The story of Fr. Bruce Ritter, who rescued runaway boys from the streets and was President Reagan’s guest at a State of the Union speech did it for me. Turned out the much-lauded priest had his bed warmed by his rescuees. Nothing that’s happened since then has been as disillusioning.

Even (especially) at its center the Catholic church seems more corrupt than it has been for many years. The corruption of the courtiers–Paglia, Coccopalmerio, “Tucho” Fernandez, et alia–suggests corruption at the very top. And unlike the dissolute papal court that so shocked Martin Luther, this degenerate clique intends the subversion of the church’s doctrine.

They all do it. If McCarrick had kept his hands off kids, he would still be everyone’s beloved Uncle Ted. What does it say about the church that when one hears that a priest or bishop has a mistress, one breathes a sigh of relief?

I always have felt that so much of this horror would be avoided if we allowed priests to be married, including, yes, into same-sex marriages.

Many tormented, faithful, young Catholic men who are gay become priests because they see priesthood as a way to become asexual, to avoid this aspect of themselves. Their sexuality doesn’t change, it is merely suppressed, and it comes out in a warped fashion.

In my all boys Catholic high school there was a priest who was notorious for getting boys alone and trying to get them interested in sex with him.

Also, when my mother joined a group devoted to St. Benedict (sorry, Rod), our family took part in a celebration with the various priests in that monastery. I remember my wife and I looking around thinking, “All of these priests are gay. This is the gayest place I’ve ever been in.” And this coming from a couple who has lived a stone’s throw from West Hollywood for over 20 years.

In any case, about 25% of the victims of priests have been women and girls. Again, see that Netflix documentary series “The Keepers,”

The Keepers focuses on events that happened 50 years ago. There is no way that 25% of abuse victims from the 1970s and 1980s — the stories that are belatedly coming out now — were women and girls. And among priests who break their vows with adults, I cannot believe that mistresses make up a quarter of the partners. Who is kidding whom?

As this topic has been high on Rod’s agenda for some time, I wanted to add a bit of context that may be interesting to some. I graduated from a well-known and highly respected Divinity School some 40 years ago, but after careful thought and personal reflection, I chose a career in secular society, which has been rewarding and satisfying.

I remain close to a few of my classmates, but not too many. For one reason, I have never been so enmeshed in a group with so many bizarre and complex relationships to gender, sex and personhood as I was during my days in Divinity School. The world outside seemed (and still seems) extremely boring by comparison—-even today, notwithstanding all of Rod’s comments and links about today’s culture.

I have learned not to confuse correlation with causation, but I have to say that the number of atypical, abnormally sexually aggressive, and generally sexually confused, gay, bi-sexual, etc., etc. people in my Divinity School experience is far greater than any statistically normal sample of society—-not even close. The question (for which I have no answer) is whether those drawn to the ministry are naturally sexual outliers, or whether the ministry brings out sexually strange behavior. I will never know the answer to this, but I the degree of correlation is surprising and has been a mystery to me for more than 40 years since I graduated.

Sadly, this is nothing new and only the particulars are unique to the Roman Catholic Church. It happens in Evangelical churches, in secular “after school programs”, and even within families.
Humanity is desperately, desperately sick and this is why we need a Savior. It’s tough to accept the level of depravity in our hearts, especially for those who have not given into it (or don’t recognize that they have). But it is there, in one form or another. A sure sign that someone is giving into it, or eventually will, is the denial of its existence and insistence that precautions are not needed.

You know, every time I try to explain why it’s not really accurate to blame what Rod calls lavendar mafias OR the sexual revolution per se for these problems of sexual misconduct by Catholic clergy, I realize I should qualify that by noting that same-sex behavior in seminaries and the sexual revolution that stirred things up in the late 60s and throughout the 70s DID have a major influence on the sex abuse stories coming to the fore right now. Both assertions can be true simultaneously; it’s complicated. I”ll try to make this coherent in that new thread Rod posted with Uncle Ted’s image attached, the one on “MacCarrick’s networks.” Lavendar mafias by any other name…Sigh.

James,
I just saw your comment after I posted my attempt to qualify what I’d originally said to the effect of “quit blaming teh gayz.” Confusing correlation and causation is what I was getting at. Thank you. I didn’t intend to deny any correlation at all…or even that there was some causation with regard to the broader cultural changes of the 60s and 70s, which have in one sense endured but in another, dissipated. Maybe you had to be there. Anyway, what you say about Divinity school is interesting. Are most dominated by men? I ask, because the all-male environments of Catholic seminaries have always made same-sex experiences among Catholic seminarians more common than in the population at large. That coupled with the fact that before the 70s, many adolescents entered junior seminaries smack dab in the middle of puberty, where they were when the sexual revolution hit like a ton of bricks, goes a long way, I think, ytoward explaining why, when allegations of sex abuse against priests are plotted along a grid by chronology, the biggest surge shows up among that cohort of priests who were in seminaries in the 1960s and 70s. The opening of some seminaries to both lay men and women studying theology, as well as the closing of junior seminaries and other reforms have aimed at changing the pattern.

For one thing, mistresses aren’t normally counted as abuse victims, although some undoubtedly are. For another, the stats on abuse I was quoting are from abuse activist Richard Sipe and are compiled mainly from Catho!ic diocesan records of official allegations made against Catholic priests from, I believe, the 20th century to now. The largest number DO refer to incidents that occurred 40 and 50 years ago, or at least starting at that time. That cohort of priests make up the largest number of abusers prosecuted in recent times. MacCarrick at 87 is about 15 years older than their mean. Such stats obviously don’t include unreported incidents, such as these off-the-record complaints by seminarians or ex-seminarians of being propositioned by other seminarians or adult priests.

@james: from my experience in medical school, and the medical profession for decades, the same is true of the psychiatric profession.”

I’ve had a number of friends who went into the mental health profession over the years who observed the same thing, that they are more screwed up than average and will be in positions to do great harm. The suggestion was that they chose the profession to cure or understand themselves. I’m not sure what the corollary would be for seminary, though.

Christian religious professionals and the institutions they lead universally bystand to institutional evil when manifested in established legal records of corporation or government agency law-breaking that harms or kills people or well-evidenced claims of such law-breaking.

So why should anyone be surprised that they bystand to sex abusers in their professional tribe too?